NASdisks
Filter NAS hard drives by CMR/SMR, capacity, reliability.
A while back I was expanding a home NAS (it's past 1PB now) and kept hitting the same wall: it's weirdly hard to tell whether a drive is actually CMR or SMR before you buy it. Manufacturers have quietly slipped SMR into NAS-branded lines, and an SMR drive can choke or drop out during a RAID rebuild - exactly when you don't want surprises. I'd end up with a dozen browser tabs open, half of them disagreeing.
So I built one table for myself. It turned into NASdisks: https://www.nasdisks.com
CMR or SMR, verified - not guessed
Real failure rates I computed from Backblaze's public Drive Stats, not vendor marketing
Live price and price-per-TB, updated daily across a few regions
Price history, plus a side-by-side comparison view (think cpubenchmark, but for NAS drives)
It's free, no login, no ads. The full dataset is public under CC BY 4.0, and there's an open API. It's a solo, self-funded side project, launched about six weeks ago, monetized only by Amazon affiliate links so hosting pays for itself.
I'd genuinely love feedback from this crowd - on the product, the positioning, or how you'd try to grow something this niche. A lot of the best features so far came from people just telling me what they needed.
4 Comments
Solving the CMR vs SMR nightmare during RAID rebuilds is an absolute lifesaver. Integrating Backblaze’s Drive Stats directly alongside live price-per-TB is brilliant—vendor marketing metrics are usually useless. Huge respect for keeping the dataset open under CC BY 4.0 and offering an open API!
Curious — are users mostly one-time buyers, or does this turn into a repeat workflow for upgrades/research?
What stood out to me was the emphasis on “verified, not guessed.” In a category where conflicting information is the norm, that feels like a much stronger differentiator than simply having a bigger database.
I’m curious have you found people come for the CMR/SMR lookup and then stick around for the pricing and reliability data, or are those what convince them to keep coming back?
The interesting part of NASdisks is turning a frustrating research task into a trusted decision tool.
How are you thinking about making this become the default resource people use before buying storage, rather than just a one-time comparison site when they have a drive decision?